Maunaṃ Sammatilakṣaṇam? The Eligibility of Women for Vedic Study in Dvaita Vedānta
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract The traditional schools of Vedānta agree that women do not have the eligibility for Vedic study and ritual performance. However, commentators of Vedānta traditions must contend with references to women who are seers and learners in the Vedas. Madhva (1238–1317), the founder of Dvaita Vedānta, lays down a special category of superior (uttama) women who possess the eligibility for Vedic study. But does this category include human women, or is it limited to divine beings? This paper traces the history of shifts in the doctrine of eligibility as envisioned in the writings of major Mādhva thinkers in commentarial literature, arguing that commentators from the sixteenth century attempted to close down an earlier openness and ambiguity in the doctrine, thereby excluding human women from a special category, that would, in theory, allow them access to the Vedas.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.011 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".